A Game A Week(ish): Zombie Slayer

On Venus, a week is 1701 Earth days, or 4.65 Earth years. So on Venus, this game would have been made in 0.0111699001 weeks!

Yeah, okay. 19 days is a little longer than a week. Midterms intruded, then fall break. In total, I probably spent about 10 days working on this game. I won't be able to do a detailed breakdown, but I will give best estimates on how that time got spent.

Without further ado, the next game! It's called Zombie Slayer.

Zombie Slayer - total development time ~8 days

What it is: A game about shooting zombies in a procedural town. There is no win condition, just try to shoot as many as you can before they overwhelm you.


Where you can play it: Download it from here.

What worked: Quite a lot! Game Maker Studio is a joy to work with. It's super easy to throw together game mechanics, but the program has powerful scripting capabilities as well. I'm particularly proud of the procedural aspects of the game - the buildings are randomly placed on the map each time the game launches, and zombies spawn based on a procedural algorithm as well. Essentially, the code tries to place each building/zombie at a certain spot as determined by code (so, for instance, zombies always spawn off camera and buildings have to be a certain distance apart), and once it decides on a location the code tests for a collision with another game object. If the area is clear, the object is placed there; otherwise, the code uses the same criteria to find a different place for the object.

What didn't work: You may have noticed the art looks kind of... sketchy. By the time I had all the gameplay elements in place and debugged, my week was long past over, so I decided I would just publish the game with the placeholder art. Also, the game sometimes crashes towards the end of a round - I think this might be an error based on having too many game objects spawned at once, but I didn't have the time or inclination to track down the error.

What I learned: How to use Game Maker Studio! Also, I realized that it is much easier to develop an algorithm that places pre-existing parts in new ways, rather than an algorithm that generates a whole map from scratch. The trick is to disguise the fact that you are re-using assets.

Development Breakdown (approximate):

• Coding gameplay mechanics: 3 days
• Creating art assets: < 1 day
• Debugging/Testing: 4 days
• Build, publishing and write up: 2 days